If anyone’s been at the space in the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed me peeling labels off tiny sanitizer bottles and measuring the insides of their caps with calipers while tweaking settings in OpenSCAD. This is for a project I’ll be bringing to the Internet Yami-Ichi this Saturday, September 12th at Knockdown Center. Aside from including generic aloe-vera hand sanitizer, “hidden” within the each cap is an 8GB USB drive pre-loaded with the Tails Live OS, 1.5.1 (sticker was sent to the printer before the new release), which you can boot into from most computers that allow booting from USB drives.

Tails is maintained by a team of really awesome folks across the world who are working in the Laura-Poitras-level edge cases of severe state surveillance that no one else will invest time or money into. In making a physical manifestation with a deliberate design, I want to commemorate what they do and bring their work to the attention of new audiences, in a similar vein as one of my projects last year. Tails also depends in part from donations from its users, so I’ll be pledging 25% of each sale at the Internet Yami-Ichi directly to the Tails project.

One Response to “Keep Your Hands Bug-free with Tails, the Surveillance Sanitizer”

Note on the version on the drive: The sticker version and SHA 256 checksum on the reverse side won’t match the version installed on the drive since each drive comes with v 1.5.1, which fixes some huge Firefox security holes. v 1.5.1’s checksum is a4c9ac9eca08562a94914230100e6353d07a0f57c017411c95789351b0366198.